Raymond De Felitta’s second collaboration with producer-star Andy Garcia is a lively true-crime tale with a sensational turn from Nina Arianda.

Two decades after serving as semi-light relief for Big Apple newspaper editors in the heady days of the John Gotti trial, the richly improbable story of Tommy and Rosemarie Uva gets lively, compassionate treatment in the latest likable effort from practiced East Coast portraitist Raymond De Felitta. Though the film reunites De Felitta with Andy Garcia, the star and producer of 2010’s “City Island,” the spotlight is ceded to sparky Michael Pitt and Arianda as a Bronx-reared Bonnie and Clyde who hit on a novel, inevitably ill-fated get-rich-quick scheme: holding up Mafia social clubs, knowing the victims would keep the law out of it.

De Felitta has probed the ambitions and anxieties of regular New York citizens in a number of his features — notably “City Island” and Sundance favorite “Two Family House” — but this is his first to focus principally on underworld matters, doing so with the deglamorized, domestic focus of many a post-“Sopranos” Mafia study.

It certainly begins on an upbeat note, with Deee-Lite’s immortally kitsch club jam “Groove Is in the Heart” placing viewers immediately in the taste-challenged, politically and economically transitional milieu of early-’90s America, but a serious, unsanctimonious moral conscience will kick in well before the story’s wintry end.

Unexpectedly but effectively cast in a role that plays to his sullen strengths, Pitt has a palpable, playful rapport with Arianda, whose warm, expressive features and tinderbox comic timing recall the young Marisa Tomei — who would surely have played this role if the story had been more swiftly ripped from the headlines by Hollywood.

All you show tune skeptics, you who snicker at the spectacle of unison-dancing cats or roll your eyes at the first chords of “Don’t Rain on My Parade”: Who’s getting the last laugh now? Because suddenly, being in and grooving on and talking about musicals is the hippest thing going.